


Why You Should Be Rooting For The Vault City Hunters: A Hockey Team Primer

by Sour_Idealist



Category: Borderlands
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hockey, Fake Fandom, Gen, Metafiction, fake media
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-19
Updated: 2015-08-19
Packaged: 2018-04-15 12:57:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4607598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sour_Idealist/pseuds/Sour_Idealist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone come root for my hockey team with me, okay!</p><p>[Or: a hockey AU, written in the style of a fandom primer.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Why You Should Be Rooting For The Vault City Hunters: A Hockey Team Primer

**Author's Note:**

> ......okay, look, I just, I had the idea and I couldn't resist. A lot of credit goes to [Mondegreened](http://archiveofourown.org.users/Mondegreened) for helping me hash out the idea in chat back in April; last week I thought "you know, I could write it as a fandom primer" and that was more or less the end of that. I _have_ gotten this checked over by at least one person who doesn't care about hockey, and I'm told it's at least reasonably comprehensible.

Hello, Echonet! It’s the start of hockey season, and it occurs to me: there are not enough people out there rooting for my babies, the Vault City Hunters. Which is to say: not everyone ever is rooting for the Vault City Hunters. Which, okay, I’m biased, I’m a Vault City native, but I’m not just loyal to the team because they’re my team, I also genuinely love them. And I think, even without the hometown bias, other people would love them too, if they knew a little more! And, well, if there is one thing I can do, it is tell people about the Vault City Hunters. So, without further ado: HERE IS A PRIMER.

**TEAM BASICS**

The Vault City Hunters are a relatively young NHL franchise, created at the same time as the Hyperion Cyborgs. They play in my hooooome, an old stubborn desert town full of people who will spit in your face for saying hello but always make sure you have a hot meal if someone dies or a place to stay if your house caught fire. (I love it a lot.) They play out of the Sanctuary Center, which is the spookiest damned purple dome of a building you’ve ever seen in your life. They made it all the way to the Stanley Cup Final a couple years back, have spent the past few years picking up a few new pieces while keeping the old core, and I think it’s gonna be a really great year to watch. The goal song is this super retro soul thing no one under eighty outside Vault City has ever heard of, but I love it; it’s called “How You Like Me Now?” by The Heavy and it’s super badass. The goal horn is audible right down the street.

I can’t cover every single one of these kids here, of course, but I’m going to go through and pick out the best-known (and, at some points, the cutest.)

**THE GOALIES**

**Mordecai Cazador:** Originally the Hunters’ starting goalie; they’ve been moving more towards split starts lately, which is interesting. He doesn’t seem too fussed about it, though; he’s basically the most laid-back goalie in the league. He’s kind of everybody’s crazy uncle they wish they had – he  brews his own beer and it’s apparently drinkable (at least if you have… kind of specific taste in beer), and he has this terrifying pet raptor that’s actually technically illegal to own in the United States, so he went out and got himself an official license to handle birds of prey and does educational programs over the summer, because he refused to be separated from his pet. (Her name’s Bloodwing. Here’s a really hilarious video.) He does a bunch of other charity work with animals, too; it’s super cute.

 **Zachariah ‘Zero’ Xenos:** has the best name ever.  Former backup, now splitting! He’s kind of terrifying, but also really cute (check out  these videos of him trying to look unimpressed by a kitten.) People put cute animals on him a lot, because otherwise he’s notoriously hard to get to do things. Super, super smart – he’s working on a Masters in literature, during the offseason. On multiple separate occasions, he got so fed up with stupid media scrums that he answered every single question in haiku. Seriously, what the fuck. Nobody… really knows anything else about him! Oh, except that one time he basically tried to decapitate some guy on the Flyers with the goalie stick. (The guy had been called for goalie interference twice that night, so like, he had it coming.)

**THE DEFENSEMEN**

**Ellie Barton:** super cute badass. She’s built like a tank and super proud of it. This  photoshoot of her fixing a car is basically the greatest thing I’ve ever seen (and yes, she actually does fuck around with cars in her garage during the off-season.) Possibly the first D-man in history to have her own customized goal song, because one time at an away game in Minnesota she scored, and the arena organist decided body-shaming was cool today and played Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls.” So she turned around, bent over, and shook her ass at the crowd with all the joy in the world. Because she is just that badass. And now it’s her goal song at Sanctuary Center. Her mother, Moxxie Barton, is actually the Hunters’ head of PR; you may recognize her name from the Olympic figure-skating rosters around twenty years ago. There’s this incredibly, incredibly heartwrenching interview with the both of them where they talk about their different sports and their wildly different approaches to a lot of things – body image, but also life, and surviving in a hypercompetitive world, and sexuality, and just… womanhood in general? And how they fought their way to an understanding with each other, and, seriously, the amount of courage it must’ve taken to put this out into the world is astonishing. If you click on nothing else, click that. (Warning: I have never managed to watch it without needing to go call my mom.)

 **Axton Dahl:** Ellie’s usual D-partner (they’re the first D-pairing.) He’s a super sweet, super friendly guy, and he flirts with everyone.  Teammates! Players on the opposing team! Refs! Reporters! Fans! Random bloggers who don’t recognize him until one of their friends goes _oh my God!_ (Okay, okay, I don’t know for sure that last one is true, but… I believe it.) Openly queer; his preferred label is to not. He was actually married for a while, to an active fighter pilot at that. She’s a private figure, so I won’t be including her name. Their marriage ended a couple of years ago – we’re all pretty sure she dropped him like a hot rock – but he still works a reasonable bit with veteran support and rehab programs, which is nice of him. He and Ellie, meanwhile, are really cute – they  work on cars together! They Instagram ice-cream dates! One time he dropped gloves because someone slashed her (and she gave him an earful afterward.) They do co-interviews a lot and end up swapping hats for reasons that I assume made sense to them! I ship it a lot. And there is NOT ENOUGH FIC.

 **Salvador Gutiérrez:** Five feet of fearlessness and fury. He has possibly never once, at any point in his natural life, given a fuck. His  hockeyfights.com page is hilarious because it’s full of people who expect to win handily on account of how he comes up to their shoulder and then they get their asses kicked. One time he said he wasn’t going to start any trouble all game because his abuela was in the stands and then got into (and won) a brawl versus two of the L.A. Kings like two minutes into the second period; see here. (According to his Twitter, his grandma told him to hit them in the balls next time.) He also has a really vicious backhand, and freaks everyone out by shooting ambidextrously. Seriously, everyone – here’s a compilation someone did of other players freaking out because it's really weird. Oh, and for those of you who like bilingual men, here’s him doing an entire interview in Spanish, and here’s him switching back and forth seventeen times over the course of one conversation. (Apparently he grew up in a bilingual household.)

 **Brendan ‘Brick’ King:** The D-man who’s been on the team the longest, easy. His nickname is a shortened form of 'Brick Shithouse'. He’s a super-cutie, though; absolutely terrifying on the ice ( here’s a hits compilation, if you like watching people get slammed around like pinballs) and a boisterous, goodnatured nerdball in regular life. He has a chubby little dog named Priscilla, and a giant fucking horse of a mutt named Dusty, also female. Sometimes he puts shiny pink bows on them. Sometimes he puts giant spikey collars on them. Sometimes he puts a spikey collar on Priscilla and a pink bow on Dusty! It’s great every single time. Oh, and he’s super great with kids, too; here’s an amazing video of him playing fighting games with the captain’s daughter Tina, who you’ll hear more about in a minute. Video highlights: him being super enthused about being the prettiest, sparkliest warrior in the land, Tina asking whether she’s allowed to express attraction to the girls on camera and Brick promising that he’ll personally punch anyone who has a problem into next week.

The rest of the blueline is getting shuffled around a bit this season – a few new acquisitions, a bunch of call-ups – so we’ll see how that goes.

**THE FORWARDS**

**Roland Scorpio:** O CAPTAIN MY CAPTAIN (and top-line center). Roland is just – by all accounts, one of the most truly decent people in ice hockey. He met his daughter Tina doing charity work with Vault City orphanages, and after a couple of visits he decided to adopt her. She calls him ‘big brother,’ apparently, but legally she’s his daughter, and certainly he seems to be taking good care of her.  He keeps her science fair awards next to his hockey trophies. Roland is just – all-around the heart of this team, in ways that every single teammate and journalist has pointed out. He and Brick have had some ins and outs, but Brick admits that fundamentally he makes the team stronger; below I’ll talk for a little bit about what he means to some of the other players. In short: he’s just an honestly, incredibly caring guy, and he brings the whole team to their best. Also, personal story? I’ve met him, and he’s a little formal, but absolutely that nice in person – signed my shirt, complimented my hair, asked me about school since I had my college hoodie on, told me it was an honor to have fans like me. I didn’t stop smiling for a week, and he’s got my loyalty more-or-less permanently.

 **Patricia Tannis:** The Crazy Doctor. She’s the top-line right wing, and kind of emblematic of what makes the Hunters great, to me. A few years ago, she was an incidental trade from the Dallas Stars, thrown in to sweeten a deal that was mostly about draft picks. Honestly, people expected her to end up on waivers by the end of the year, or sent down to the AHL if nobody would take her – she was a mess of a player, prone to stupid penalties, a  self-confessed problem in the locker room, and a general PR nightmare. Not that there was any criminal behavior, or anything, she just flat-out refused to play nice with reporters. The ‘Crazy’ was attached to her long before the ‘Doctor.’ Instead, when she came to Vault City, Roland sought her out, spent the whole off-season coaxing her into opening up, and spent hours upon hours in one-on-one practice helping her sort out her game and get her head on straight. I think a little bit of credit goes to Moxxie Barton here, too – she finds ways to make Tannis’s more, uh, acerbic tendencies hilarious and charming, instead of trying to force her to be someone else. But all the marketing in the world wouldn’t have helped if Roland hadn’t seen something in her. As she put it: “I suppose, if you must, you could say he saved my career.” (There was no ‘must’. Nobody had asserted any such thing, the interviewer just asked what she thought of him. TANNIS PLEASE.) I’d ship it really hard, but one time someone implied they were together and she spent a solid fifty-seven seconds pretending to vomit, so, uh, I’m going with brotp here. Warning for that video: it’s a pretty realistic performance. At one point an intern actually gets a bucket.

 **Lilith Cashlin:** Top line left wing, one of the fastest, sneakiest players in the game.  She can come out of nowhere, snag the puck and shoot in less than the time it takes you to grab your beer off the coffee table, not that I’ve missed any great goals that way or anything. She’s been the alternate captain for almost as long as Roland’s had the C – his second year, her first, because she was a first-five pick and those don’t get to like, have time to settle into the game or anything. At least they waited until January to actually give her the A. Lilith has also been  incredibly active and outspoken about women in the game (for those of you who got here via pictures of my cat: we’re in our second or third generation of women in the NHL depending on how you count it; it’s easier than it was, but still not easy. The Hunters have the most women on the roster by a long stretch.) At one point someone – probably her, on account of how _she is a giant geek who went to Comic Con in cosplay as a Bunkers & Badasses character_ – coined the name ‘Siren Sisterhood’ for her and her friends in the league, primarily the women on the Hunters, and she refuses to let it go.

Those three, by the way, are known as the Hellfire Line, speaking of nicknames that people won’t let go.

 **Maya Monkshood** : The newer A! The lines are getting shuffled around a bit this year, but she’s been the second-line center for a while. She’s a really good defensive forward; she’s been up for the Selke Award a couple of times but never won it, in my opinion because misogyny but I am not a professional. She and Lilith were close friends and sisters-in-arms from basically the second Maya was drafted, which started the conversations that led to the Sirens thing. After the SCF loss they got matching sleeve tattoos in this really cool abstract pattern. She’s a super-intellectual hockey player, always looking for new approaches, new ways to refine and improve her game. She’ll be great to watch for a long time, I think. She does some literacy programs stuff too – check out this video of her reading Dr. Seuss books to a bunch of kids, it’s amazing.

 **Josef ‘Krieg’ Siebert:** A real old-school enforcer mostly, but last year they played him on Maya’s wing and he surprised everyone by actually starting to rack up points – he had a twenty-two-goal year. He has one of the nastiest slapshots in the entire league – it went  through the boards once – and it’s unsettlingly hot. Really, though, he’s best known for the shit that comes out of his mouth on-ice. Most of the time he’s a very nice guy! Polite, intelligent, thoughtful (also, voicekink city, like, I’m sorry.) And then he hits the ice, and, uh… look, here’s a compilation of him mic’d up. On the bright side, he’s not bleeped very often! On the flip side, uh. Uh. “Your blood is singing!” “Smell my meat!” “I will SWALLOW YOUR SOUL!” I don’t even know, you guys. He says he doesn’t even think about it, it just kind of happens. Here’s a video of one of the Kings’ d-men actually stopping in the middle of a play to go what the fuck, aka my favorite thing on the Internet. So it’s working, I guess!

 **Gaige McAlister:** Spent a lot of time on a line with Maya and Krieg last year, which… nobody called them the Matroyshka Line except me, but come ON, Krieg’s all huge and Maya’s relatively normal-sized and THEN THERE IS THIS TINY LITTLE THING. NHL.com  lists her as 5'5'', but that’s the biggest lie I’ve ever seen in my life, she’s like… five-two. She was a Calder (Rookie of the Year) finalist last year, although she didn’t get it, and has the most shots on goal per season since Alexander Ovechkin. She’s not… always super great at turning those shots into actual goals, but precision comes with time, I think! And besides, with that many shots, she’s got to score sometime. (Some people say she’s a selfish player, but I honestly think that’s bullshit – most of those shots are shots she takes when nobody else is in a particularly good place to shoot, or she clearly knows she can’t make the pass. She just has a real knack for getting the puck at weird moments and in weird angles – which I think contributes to her lack of accuracy, actually.) She was planning to go NCAA and start an engineering degree, actually, but there was some kind of scandal where she got into a huge feud with the head of BU’s science department. I don’t know the details and I’m not super comfortable looking them up, because it’s not hockey-related at all, but like twenty people saw her call him a fascist idiot with no appreciation for the scientific frontier. So, long story short, she dropped out of college like two weeks into September and signed with the Hunters at the last minute, and now she codes in the off-season. And one time said, on camera, that the NHL website was coded by a drunken monkey and she could do better over the course of a game intermission. There’s a reason we all know the name of the Hunters’ head of PR, okay. God bless 'em.

 **Angel le Belle:** The Avenging Angel. The reason all the lines are getting turned upside down, and _the_ shocking acquisition of the NHL offseason. Like, I’ll try to keep this short, but I have to explain why this is a big deal. Angel was an incredible up-and-coming hotshot center seven years back, drafted first overall by the Hyperion Cyborgs. (She was the first woman to go first overall, incidentally.) Within about two weeks, her father – ‘Handsome’ Jack le Belle, this super-sketchy energy baron – bought the team, shuffled the entire management staff around, and made Angel the face of the franchise. Which, frankly, freaked everyone out, because it was really blatant nepotism, but it’s not like she wasn’t good enough to do it on her own. Everyone figured she’d be a Cyborg for life. Then – okay, there’s a lot of really complicated contract law stuff here, and if anyone is that nerdy about hockey and wants to know, hit me in the comments, but the short version is this: this year was the first year that she could possibly sign with someone else and be sure the Cyborgs couldn’t get her back. This was also the year her contract ran out, which is kind of unusual timing. And, literally within five minutes of the official start of the offseason, she revealed she’d signed with the Vault City Hunters for less than a quarter of what she used to make. Basically nobody had the faintest idea what the fuck, but I’d bet every cent I have and my signed Scorpio jersey to boot that there was something incredibly sketchy going on with the Cyborgs, and I could go on and on and on about that but eventually it devolves into conspiracy theory territory, so I’m just going to say one thing.  This is a video of her last year, with the Cyborgs, when she has about as much emotion as vintage Siri. This is a video of her at the start of this season, where she smiles so much that I’m pretty sure the whole town is glowing. Okay? Yeah, the first video was from right after the Cyborgs clinched their playoff spot. The second video was from after the Hunters, I am sorry to say, got their sorry asses kicked 5-2 by the freakin’ Carolina Hurricanes. I REST MY CASE, OKAY. Something got a whole lot better for this girl in the last six months, and I’m already saving up for a le Belle Hunters jersey.

Again, the bottom two lines are kind of all over the place right now - new teammates, new arrangements, trying to figure out how best to fit Angel into the lineup, because she’s among the top six players in the game today - but it’s looking really great. Come watch these cuties play with me; I think we’re going to see something amazing come together.


End file.
